Life with O.P.

Of course you know about my buddy O.T., the old turkey hunter that runs the mower shop and his brother O.D. the expert deer hunter that holds court at the store in Browningsville. The brother I met first,however, was O.P. , the baby of the bunch. O.P. has a trailer up the road on the way to Brownsville. KYHillChick and I hadn’t even closed on the property back in 2001 when O.P. showed up to introduce himself. O.P. was quite nice. We shook hands and all and then O.P. launched into his pitch.

1) O.P. wanted to know if we were related to the new owners, because he wanted to ask permission to hunt.

2) O.P. had been asking everyone he saw come by since 1982 when the house went vacant for permission to hunt, but had been turned down at every instance. The owners had been telling him to piss off.

3) O.P. had been actively hunting the property all his life and knew where all the good hunting places were. In fact, he had taken a nice 8 pointer over on my ridge over Thanksgiving last year.

4) O.P. wanted permission for not only himself, but for his family and a Country Western band from Lexington whose members he was trying to impress. The were famous, but I had not heard of them.

I was a bit naive I guess. I wrote out a letter of permission for O.P. for a small 5 acre plot that I did not expect to be hunting in the near future. O.P. thanked me profusely, and promised I would not be sorry. Frankly, I wanted to see what was going to happen.

I found out later that O.P. seldom ever asked permission. I guess we were a special case. When the Conservation Officer showed up in 2004 to service my poaching complaints from 2001 he asked about O.P. in particular. O.P was already a 2-time offender and was going away for hard time if he was caught poaching again. I also asked the previous owner about O.P. O.R. said that they had been putting up with O.P. since he was a kid, but that he was mostly harmless and a lousy shot and nobody paid attention to him– except the time he shot somebody’s gobbler decoy. That was when he’d finally achieved dubious stardom in our end of the county

I never did see O.P. or the C&W band that year, but I got a call from the plumber, who was trying to get the line from the cistern running again, so we could flush the toilet. He called me at work rather breathless.

“This is Dave, your plumber.””Yes, Dave.””Sorry to bother you, but I saw something you probably need to be aware of.””Yes, what is it?”

“Well, I started hearing shooting outside and I went out and there was your neighbor up the road. He was in his bathrobe and his underwear and he was out on his deck firing at a herd of deer that were on your property. There was about seven of ’em.”

“Yes, he’s prone to that.”

“Well, Sir, he ran out of bullets in his 30-30 and went back inside. The deer didn’t pay him no mind. A little later he came back out and started firing at the deer again.”

“Did he hit anything?”

“I don’t think so. The deer didn’t seem to care, but he did finally manage to make them run off. He ran through a box or more.”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s O.P., and I probably need to talk to him about it, but he never seems to hit anything. Thanks for letting me know.”

Actually, I kind of let that one ride. It was not the plot I had specified in the letter, but his trailer was so far from my place, I doubted he could hurt anything lobbing 30-30 at the field. The real turning point was the next Spring Gobbler Season. He fired his shotgun in our direction when I was out with little Mooseboy from the middle of our property. I ran into him on the way out that day and let him know that he was not to pester my birds again. For years, folks told me O.P. was hiding from me, thinking I was going to kill him.